My experience

I started working with computers in 1982, when an IBM PC cost thousands, used 360KB floppy disks and had a green screen.  Most of the initial work was creating Macros and formulas in Lotus 1-2-3 to help the accountants in a local manufacturing plant take their pages of ledger paper used for forecasting and turn them into spreadsheets that could do forecasts within a day rather than a week. and with fewer calculation errors. A lot of time was spent swapping disks in and out, copying and making backups. I had always loved puzzles and this let me get paid for solving puzzles. 

Shortly after that, I expanded into database programming using dBase, quickly followed up with Clipper, a compiler to create programs that would work with the xBase data. While math and macros in a spreadsheet was interesting, this was even more fun because there were so many more options available to use to solve the puzzles. Clipper led to Turbo Pascal, paying for my college education in Poltical Science/PreLaw. Halfway through my Senior year, I was offered an opportunity to take a programming job and I never looked back.

Being an Employee

 Involvement with local users groups led to a gig within a Telecommunications company, where the founder said he loved me but couldn't afford my fees, would I like to be an employee? I said yes and spent most of the 1990s in Telecommunications. That company was purchased by one of the Baby Bells and I got to learn a lot about what goes on when companies are negotiating to merge and what happens after the merger. I then went with the founder who hired me and got a crash course in why start ups are hard. So I left to go work for the Baby Bell and worked my way up from the only programmer to a manager of the IT Department. Management has it's own set of puzzles to work out, but I missed the more immediate problem solving that programming provided. So I looked to the next chapter in my life.

Consulting / Speaking / Writing

I took a job as a consultant for a nationwide consulting firm. I spent most of a decade working for various consulting firms, learning new about new companies as diverse as government jobs, auto dealership management software and manufacturing. It was a good time to be a consultant, as I usually got to work with newer technology and learned about how organizations worked, broadening my understanding of the puzzles I was solving beyond just the technical aspects and into how they impacted organizations as well.

Not only that, I spoke at several large tech conferences and published both a book and a number of articles in well-known tech magazines like MSDN and  a monthly column in VisualStudio Magazine.

Secure, Scalable Multi-Tenant SaaS

In 2005, I left consulting to join another start up. This one was a very small team of 3 that was writing an SaaS application to allow companies with Intellectual Property to monetize those properties. While SaaS is obvious today, it wasn't then. There were a lot of issues that needed to be addressed as we wrote our code. Single Sign On (SSO)? Nope, had to write our own version. CDN? Nope. In fact, I'm sorry to say, we didn't even consider the international market so all of the data timestamps were in the local server time. I spent 6 years there before changes at the company had me seeking other opportunities. However, not long after I left, I ended up working as a consultant for that same company.

Quality Assurance, Testing, Law Firms

I spent several years consulting again, working as a software tester, which really opened my eyes to how much work I needed to do to write better code so that it would handle the bugs I was finding as a tester for other coders work. It made me determined to think about the needs of testing and how to make code more bulletproof. I also ended up working as a coder for an accounting law firm, which provided me an opportunity to learn about data warehousing and reports in a way I hadn't considered.

SaaS Again

An opening came available back at the same SaaS company I had left previously and I jumped at it. The work was exciting and I discovered, first hand, how the code I had written when I first started with the company was not properly thought through. Inconsistent naming made things harder. As I worked there, I though about start ups and how coding is done there. Having worked through a couple of startups, I know that there is a huge push to get a proof of concept done, which is not a bad thing. Too frequently, however, that PoC ends up in production. I realized that, applying the best practices from the start that I had spent decades learning, would take little more time and effort but would provide a Proof of Concept that wouldn't creak under the strain of more users.

Which Brings Us to Today

And that's why I founded Secure-Scalable.Solutions, to enable more companies to use what I have learned to build software that is secure and scalable. We offer a number of services to help your company and are always looking to add more. I'm working on a white paper of Best Practices for Secure, Scalable, Multi-Tenant SaaS applications. Register on the site to be kept up to date with what's new.

Josef

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